Sun, 09 Nov 2008
My Job (or, What I'm Doing With My Life)
I recently realised that, whilst people who I see on a regular basis are aware of what I'm doing at the moment, most people don't really have a clue about what I'm up to. As the latter group of people is fairly large, I thought I'd post to make people aware.
So, I'm currently doing an Intercalated Year as part of my Computer Science degree at the University of Warwick. This means that I'm spending a year working in industry (rather than on my degree), and means that I will get a "Computer Science (with Intercalated Year)" degree rather than a "Computer Science" degree, assuming I graduate. That really is the only difference it makes to me, academically.
I've been working since the end of August at an open source consultancy called credativ. credativ is a German company, with about forty staff in their office in Germany, but I work in the UK branch in Rugby, where there are three full-time staff. The company does a combination of systems administration, project work and bespoke coding.
For those of you not on Planet WUGLUG, Planet UWCS or Planet Bazaar (I'm looking at you, Facebook readers), an 'open source consultancy' is an IT consultancy that works primarily with open source software, sometimes known as 'free software'. This is software that is both free as in beer and free as in freedom, essentially meaning that anyone can take it and modify or use it as they wish. The fact that such a company exists is evidence that free software does not mean doom and gloom for software developers (though I won't vouch for those who have been unwise enough to tie them to proprietary systems).
As a consultancy, we, and therefore 'I', do a wide variety of things. So far, I've been involved in writing a presentation player using the OpenOffice API, creating Fedora 8 packages for OpenOffice, setting up monitoring using Nagios and munin, doing some Debian packaging and other general maintenance work.
So, that's what I'm doing with my life at the moment.
Posted: Sun, 09 Nov 2008 20:19 | | Comments: 1